


Spark

by Dahlia_Llewellyn



Series: Strange Little Girls: A Tori Amos Playlist [2]
Category: Tori Amos (Musician)
Genre: Drug Addiction, F/M, Loss, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-03 02:11:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6592450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dahlia_Llewellyn/pseuds/Dahlia_Llewellyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She's convinced she could hold back a glacier,/but she couldn't keep baby alive..."-Tori Amos, "Spark" off the album From the Choirgirl Hotel (1998).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spark

**Author's Note:**

> "Spark" was the second song I wrote about for the series "Strange Little Girls." I wrote it the same day as "Parasol," and it came to me as if it had been waiting for me to write it for years. The character, who is anonymous, felt so real to me that she just wrote herself. I have always loved the song "Spark" for its raw, unyielding portrayal of the pain of miscarriage and the confusion, rage, and sadness that comes with such a loss. If sources are to be believed, Tori Amos wrote this song in response to her own experience with miscarriage, as she had with the song "Talula" off of her genius album "Boys for Pele". I hope that this little piece captured some of the reality behind this beautiful song.

Another patch on my left shoulder makes me look like a goddam soldier. I’m starting to think my red badge of courage is these damn Nicorette patches. As long as I wear a leather jacket, no one will really notice I have five on at once.

Five months in, and to have it not work out…

I suppose there are worse things than a cigarette addiction I can’t kick, and all of them keep happening to me. Would you believe me if I said I don’t even care at this point?

I would _kill_ for a cigarette. I would murder a man if it meant I could breathe in that sweet, scratching tar, holding it in my lungs like a little baby, only to push it out my lungs, billowing out of me like water.

Now it hurts again…my damn uterus. No one mentioned how much it would still hurt afterward, but no one tells you much about these things. But Nicotine patches—shit, they practically have technical manuals written on the subject.

So why aren’t the damned things working for me? I can’t go through the course of a day without putting at least five on me. Five…dammit, five of them, always five.

I can’t exactly stop myself, can I? I’ve got one body and it needs to be accommodating. It needs to breathe, and bleed, and expand, and contract. It needs to be able to do these things. It needs to—it _should be able_ to—do all of these things.

* * * * * * * *

My mother always told me that my habit would kill me, but she doesn’t know that she was wrong about which one. She insisted it would be the smoking and boozing that would get me, but those were kids’ stuff compared to what habit hurts more.

Falling in love is an incredibly deadly habit. Love makes you think you understand the world, makes you think you’re invincible, and then it drops you in a few months of pre-wedded bliss and leaves you with the feeling of someone quitting cold turkey.

I have fallen for all the wrong men, but all of them were right in their own ways for the times I loved them. Bobby taught me to smoke, Billy taught me to fuck like it was a religion, and Frank taught me to drink deep of everything that could be bought in a bottle.

Whether they loved me or not is always the question, and Mom always said they weren’t good for me, not really. And she’s right. With each of them came a new addiction, a new fixation, and a new belief that whoever I loved was going to keep the demons at bay for me, my knight in shining armor.

I suppose it doesn’t need saying that I needed saving. I eventually reached AA in the late nineties for the first time, not making it past the abstinence phase. I couldn’t give up my current addiction, Jerry, who had encouraged me to seek help until it meant he couldn't get sex. Amazing how all men have needs, they say, but do they always have to be the same ones?

I landed into a rehab facility in 2004, aged 27 and feeling like I was washed out and wrinkled and washed again. I told myself, then and there, that I wasn’t ever going back. Not to the man who had beaten me to within an inch of my sanity. Not to the drugs and pills. Not to the alcohol. Not to any of it.

The eating disorder they found almost haphazardly, and it felt like I had been hit with the “fuck me” stick for the thousandth time in my life. They told me I would not be able to have kids if I didn’t turn myself around completely.

What choice did I have? In my own fucked up way, I always pictured the white picket fence and the kids that came with it. I wasn’t going to be a June Cleaver, but I could settle for somewhere between Carol Brady and that lady on the Cosby show. I wanted to be a mom someday, and my habits were finally going to jeopardize my body to the point that my big dream, my normal life, was going to fall into the gutter along with all the other dreams I’d lost over the years to the wrong men at the wrong time with the wrong habits.

* * * * * * * *

I finally met the right man about three years after I was clean, back to a healthy weight, and recovered from everything except my annoying habit of smoking cigarettes. His name is Samuel, or Sammy as I call him. We’ve been together now for two years, and we’re thinking of getting married. I met him online, which most people don’t understand, but Sammy is the best thing that’s happened to me.

Unlike all of the other men before, Sammy gets how hard it is for me to hold my head up and say, “I am an addict, but I’m clean.” Only he knows what that means, because he’s done the twelve steps, too, for heroin and crack. He knows that being sober doesn’t give you some badge of honor, nor does sobriety buy you a free pass out of fucking up in other aspects of your life.

In other words, Sammy became the first man I wasn’t addicted to, but was simply in love with because he was good to me and worth loving. He didn’t supply me with anything other than the sheer love of his heart. And together we learned to try to quit cigarettes. We both quit cold turkey around August of this year, and with good reason.

I was pregnant.

(Emphasis on the _was_ ).

* * * * * * * * *

It was five months in when I lost the baby. Five months…everything had been looking so good. The sonograms showed a little girl, and Sammy burst into tears as he was holding my hand. That was the moment I fell in love with our baby, our little girl. I was even beginning to form a name for her in my heart the moment I knew I was pregnant.

Don’t get me wrong, I was scared shitless. I told my mother and a part of her looked as terrified as I felt. She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “You’re absolutely sure?” What she meant was that “was I sure I was ready”? I nodded, but in my heart I was still scared. She knew it, and I knew it. Maybe even the baby knew it. Maybe that’s why my little spark couldn’t stay.

Or maybe it was years of drugs, alcohol and wayward living that had warped my body, making it unlivable. Maybe she could sense she wasn’t safe, my little spark. She was smart, I suppose. She knew what she was getting into.

Sammy and I were getting ready for her nonetheless, buying pink shoes and little pink rompers saying Daddy’s Little Girl. Sammy was a proud papa, even before she was born. I knew in my heart he was going to be a good daddy, Nicotine patches and all. And we’d make love knowing the baby was there, and he’d tell me what a beautiful momma I was.

* * * * * * * * * * 

And then I lost her. It all started at 6:58 am, before the light of day could come. I felt her leaving me, and I don’t remember much else besides the blinding pain of it. All the tears. The words from Sammy telling me it would be okay, little momma, it will be okay.

But nothing was okay. Nothing was okay. She was leaving me. She was going. And I kept screaming in the backseat of the car, refusing to believe that this was really happening to me. No, not my little spark, not my little hope. Hope! That was her name, and I was only now realizing it. She was my hope, my little miracle that I could wrap in a blanket and keep safe. She was my baby, I couldn’t lose her. I couldn’t lose her like so many other dreams, so many other babies I had held in the palm of my hand, so many broken dreams. So many broken dreams, and this dream breaking me from the inside out.

How could my body betray me now? Why didn’t I die of an overdose at fifteen, or stick myself with so many needles that eventually I hit the wrong vein, only to lose her now?

 


End file.
